Gothic

October 16, 2015

The Babysitter Murders ****/**** (d. Ryan Spindell) For certain artists working in the short-film format, I don't have any idea how or why it is they haven't been called up to the big leagues yet. This speaks as much to my prejudice, obviously: there's nothing wrong with the short form. In literature, many of my favourite writers are best in the short form. In film, though, there's so little real opportunity for distribution that it seems a particular shame when guys like Ryan Spindell have only produced shorts. I'm not complaining (his work is excellent), merely hoping he has the means to continue. Spindell's latest, The Babysitter Murders, is so expertly composited that it would be kind of a shame to dissect it at all. Sufficed to say that it unearths a new place to take Wes Craven's Scream meta funhouse, and does it without a hint of smugness or show-off-y insecurity. It's beautifully paced, conceived, and executed. Look at a cooking scene early on, set to "Fast & Sweet" by Mondo Boys feat. Kestrin Pantera--the way it's shot and edited, the way Elie Smolkin's camera stalks and Eric Ekman cuts it all together. The movie's premise--a babysitter alone on a stormy night when a psycho escapes from an asylum--is as rote as they come, but Spindell, as he did with The Root of the Problem and dentists, finds something new to say. The performances are to a one pitch-perfect and the gore is appropriately horrifying; it's a film balanced in that space between hilarity for its excess and hilarity for its brilliance. I'm out of superlatives. Spindell is one of the finest voices working in genre right now, carving out a niche that's neither self-serious nor self-abnegating. He's full of joy, this one, and his movies are treasures.

October 14, 2015

by Walter Chaw I love Guillermo del Toro. I love the ethic driving Cronos and The Devil's Backbone and the Frankenstein and Pinocchio myths driving Mimic. I love the Prodigal Son of Blade II, the ferocity, of course, and vision of Pan's Labyrinth, and all of Hellboy II: The Golden Army, my favourite of his films; every frame is wonder. I didn't like Pacific Rim but I did think it was at least all-in and there's something to be said for that. And now here's Crimson Peak, which is just, you know, really bad and for no one. I have a friend who referred to del Toro's book version of The Strain (I've never read it) as arrogant. I didn't understand that, but it tickled during Pacific Rim and has found full flower now in Crimson Peak. There's a point at which someone who is an expert in something can go from teacher to pedant. What begins as a conversation, nurturing and full of joy, becomes patronizing and solipsistic. I myself probably crossed over years ago. Now I have company. Del Toro at his best shares what he loves. At his worst (and Crimson Peak is del Toro at his worst, by a long shot), he believes that he's talking over your head. You couldn't possibly understand. You'll never catch all his references, he says. And suddenly the party's over and he's all by himself in his self-aggrandizing echo chamber of curiosities.

by Walter Chaw Delightfully, extravagantly bizarre, Robert Bierman's Vampire's Kiss houses arguably Nicolas Cage's most peculiar performance in the service of a piece the contemporary in every way of Oliver Stone's Wall Street and the precursor, in every way, to Mary Harron's American Psycho. It excoriates the boy's club of the executive boardroom, treats sexual harassment and assault like real things with real consequences, and has something to say on the subjects of race and the economic caste. It's a canny satire of the vampire genre even as it's an honourable addition to it, exploring those metaphorical elements that transformed vampirism in the '80s into the equivalent of being the "cool kid" (The Lost Boys), the rock star (The Hunger), and the eternally demon lover (Fright Night). Working from a script by Joseph Minion, who not only wrote Martin Scorsese's brilliant (and in some ways similar) After Hours but also the Scorsese-helmed episode of "Amazing Stories" called "Mirror, Mirror" (itself an antecedent to David Robert Mitchell's It Follows), Bierman proves himself an able navigator of Minion's liminal cartography. Vampire's Kiss is about the spaces between and the things that fall in there.

November 10, 2014

****/**** Image A+ Sound A Extras Astarring Deborah Kerr, Peter Wyngarde, Megs Jenkins, Michael Redgravescreenplay by William Archibald and Truman Capote, based on The Turn of the Screw by Henry Jamesdirected by Jack Clayton

by Walter Chaw Jack Clayton's incomparable tale of sexual repression and a very particular vintage of Victorian, feminine hysteria opens with shadows, wrung hands, and the sound of weeping. The Innocents is of a kind with Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" and Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress": that marriage of high burlesque and menacing metaphysics that is on the one hand dense and open to unravelling, and on the other as smothering and lush as a Raymond Chandler hothouse. By opening in the exact same way as Jacques Tourneur's/Val Lewton's I Walked with a Zombie--a flashback/forward to a non-diegetic scene, a sitting-room interview, a claustrophobic setting laced with musk and frustration and the ghosts of the sins of the father--it announces itself as an expressionistic piece orbiting around a Brontë heroine. Having Truman Capote adapt Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, right in the midst of his In Cold Blood period (two taxonomists of beasts in the jungle of the Id), is an act of genuine inspiration. Their shared illness infects the film.

by Jefferson Robbins As one of the twin stars of the original Hammer
Films horror canon, the precise and skilful Peter Cushing had the task
of portraying both villain (Dr. Frankenstein) and vanquisher (Dr. Van
Helsing). His co-star Christopher Lee, on the other hand, seldom got to
be the good guy: when he wasn't baring plastic fangs or crusted over
with dried-prune makeup, he usually embodied a more human evil. Lee's
unmasked performances were assertions of will--his Dracula, for
instance, overwhelms with force of presence and a hungry smoulder in
his eyes. Cushing could not disguise his native gentility and bladed
intelligence, but he could turn those qualities towards sinister or
humanitarian ends as needed.

October 22, 2013

by Jefferson Robbins Back in September, I published the Kindle ebook The Curse of Frankenstein: A Dissection--a scene-by-scene analytical love letter to a film that shaped me, and discloses hidden depths the more one looks at it.

by
Walter Chaw The theory is that gangs of artists working at
around the same time in the same place, in complementary milieux,
can lead to something like artistic Darwinism, a certain macho
brinkmanship that pushes genres towards a kind of organic evolution.
Within a very few years, artists like John Carpenter, John Landis,
Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, Rob Bottin, Rick Baker, Sam Raimi, Brian
DePalma, Bob Clark, Dan O'Bannon, Sean S. Cunningham, Wes Craven, Tobe
Hooper, Stan Winston, Larry Cohen, and on and on and so on, were
working in and reinvigorating the horror genre--many under the tutelage
of Roger Corman, still others the initial products of formal film
school training, almost all the consequence of a particular movie
geekism that would lead inevitably to the first rumblings of jokiness
and self-referentiality-as-homage that reached its simultaneous
pinnacle and nadir with Craven's Scream. In the
late 1970s into the early 1980s, however, that cleverness wasn't so
much the hateful, patronizing post-modernism of the last decade's
horror films as what feels like a genuine affection for the genre--an
appreciation of the legacy of the Universal, Corman, and Hammer horror
factory traditions.

July 19, 2013

by Bill Chambers The Golden Razzies
are the worst: Earlier this year, they (dis)honoured Keanu Reeves for one of
the only decent performances he's ever given, in Sam Raimi's The
Gift. With his horrendous turns in The Replacements
and The Watcher also up for grabs, I can only say
that these anti-Oscars would be more clever and thought-provoking if
they quit aiming their guns at sitting hams (witness George C. Scott's
Raspberry for his outstanding work in The Exorcist III); they long ago became the spoof-awards equivalent of a male comedian cracking
wise about his mother-in-law. But then, The Gift
hasn't garnered much respect at all, except from those who watched for
the specific purpose of glimpsing "Dawson's Creek"'s Katie Holmes in
the buff. She plays a society slut in this southern gothic, which
failed to exceed genre expectations during its curiously staggered theatrical
release last winter. Yet there are times when a film should be lauded
for fulfilling a set of obligations, and this is one of them.

by
Bill Chambers In general, TV series aren't built to last beyond
four seasons. I think it has something to do with how the educational
system
teaches us that four-year cycles end in graduation. Showrunners
consequently
feel an obligation to symbolically reboot in season five--to send the
high-schoolers off to college ("Dawson's Creek"), to recast the leads
("The Dukes of Hazzard"), to have Fonzie waterski over Jaws
("Happy Days"). To be fair, redefining the status quo doesn't always
mean jumping the shark: for every Cousin Oliver, after all, there's a
Dawn
Summers. Unfortunately, "True Blood" is not one of the exceptions to
the rule, as it goes off the rails in its fifth season in a way that is
different from those countless other times it seemed to be flying
a
kamikaze mission towards ratings oblivion. (This is a show that has
elevated
jumping the shark to an artform.) A good chunk of the season is devoted
to
vampires--creatures who can, in the "True Blood"-verse, run like The
Flash, fly, and fuck like pornstars--sitting around a conference table
debating
politics and religion, and the other "super" groups don't exactly
pick up the slack, what with the werewolves holding auditions for a new pack
leader
and the faes throwing slumber parties with their new BFF, Sookie.

by Alex Jackson Dr. John Buchanan (John
Hurt) is a brilliant scientist in New Los Angeles, circa 2031. One of
his experiments fractures the space-time continuum, sucking him into
nineteenth-century Geneva, where he meets Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Raul
Julia), who's busy conducting a few experiments of his own. In the
meantime, the Frankenstein maid is on trial for the murder of Victor's
brother. Nobody knows how she did it, though they figure it's
witchcraft. Because he read the book (Frankenstein,
of course), Buchanan knows that Frankenstein's monster (Nick Brimble)
is the true culprit. Frankenstein is refusing to admit to his failed
experiment, however, and would rather allow this girl to die than
confront his crimes against God. Exasperated, Buchanan goes to Mary
Shelley (Bridget Fonda) for help. As for the monster, he's terrorizing
Frankenstein and insisting that the scientist create him a female
companion.

by
Walter Chaw "True
Blood" is pulp crap. Yet as Bryant
and Bill
have already so eloquently pointed
out, it's highly-addictive pulp crap--the sort of shallow,
handsomely-mounted titillation that fosters the craze that sprung
up around prime-time soaps like "Dynasty" and "Falcon
Crest". White-collar smut
that traffics in the currency of the age: once upon a time it was the
super-rich, now it's the supernatural. Plus ça change, plus
c'est la meme. It's certainly soapier than
showrunner/creator Alan Ball's previous pay-cable drama, "Six Feet
Under", but to its credit what "True Blood" does in returning sexuality--and gore, and (southern) Gothic trappings--to the
vampire mythos, it does
well. The shame of it is that it seems to be ashamed of itself and so
continually strives for relevance in aligning the plight of its
vampire underclass to gay rights. Bill said it first, but is the
appropriate
supernatural analogue to gays really vampires? Is it wise to suggest
that gays
present that same kind of sexual allure? The same kind of blood
contagion?
Doesn't that play into the Conservative storyline a bit too neatly?
At least
it's not "The Walking Dead".

by Walter Chaw
Britain's Hammer Studios all but defined the period horror film from
the late-Fifties on, making matinee idols of Christopher Lee and Peter
Cushing as Bram Stoker's Dracula and erstwhile vampire hunter Van
Helsing. But musty is what most Hammer productions remain (with notable
exceptions like Quatermass and the Pit), and as the
drive-in exploitation ethic of Herschell Gordon Lewis began to redefine
the limits of what could be shown with regards to gore and nudity in
the United States (arguably, the European films that found currency in
the Sixties with a more sophisticated audience had as much or more to
do with the "opening" of America's notorious piety), the studio found
itself distressingly out of touch--Merchant/Ivory doing The
Matrix.

February 25, 2013

by Jefferson
Robbins I've wondered for a
long time why I love the Hammer Film takes on the Universal monsters. I
discovered them in my youth, so there's the nostalgia thing; and they
typically involve stuff a young man loves: disfigurement, cleavage,
viscera, cleavage, death. But the communion is somehow deeper than
that. Guillermo del Toro describes
his youthful exposure to creature features in the language of a
Catholic embracing Jesus: "At a certain age, I accepted monsters in my
heart." Yeah.

by Walter Chaw Somewhere between the good-bad of Lost Souls
and the bad-bad of Bless the Child is the
medium-bad of The Order (just north of the
medium-bad of Stigmata), a Brian Helgeland film
that, using much of the same cast from his A Knight's Tale,
squanders a pretty interesting concept and a handful of powerful scenes
on so much confused exposition that it's nigh impossible to get too
invested in the thing. More of a shame is that the foundation for the
piece is such a strong one, revolving as it does around the idea that
the Catholic Church would be hateful towards a personage who could
absolve sin outside the Church proper, allowing sinners a "backdoor"
into salvation. Since it's a simple conceit and a thorny one, it's easy
to see why Helgeland thought he had something here. It's only with the
ponderous details the hyphenate loads onto this cart that The
Order gets irretrievably bogged down.

January 25, 2013

****/****screenplay by John August and
Pamela Pettler and Caroline Thompsondirected by Tim Burton & Mike Johnson

by
Walter Chaw A self-contained, melancholic, dulcet little ode to love
and sacrifice, Tim Burton's stop-motion Corpse Bride
is also a sly stab at class systems, a knowing tribute to both the
Hammer horror run and the Universal monster tradition, and another of
Burton's evocations of German Expressionism. As fairy tale, it rivals
his Edward Scissorhands, as underworld fantasia,
his Beetlejuice, and as classic studio-bound
horror, his Sleepy Hollow--in many ways, in fact,
Burton's return to the stop-motion of his breakthrough short Vincent
(and his co-produced The Nightmare Before Christmas)
feels like a figurative homecoming to the technique that suits him
best. William Blake described an "infernal method" in his theory of
creation wherein the artist touched every page of every print of his
work to infuse it, ineffably, with the hand of its creator, and so
stop-motion, with every movement manipulated painstakingly by the human
hand, is infused with a Romanticist's idea of (possibly Satanic) vigor.
It's animation that gives the term its "soul"--there's something vital
about Corpse Bride that has nothing to do with its
story, and watching it, you come to the realization that the reason so
much of Burton's work feels airless or dated (or that his stars are so
perverse) is that his way with puppets translates only uneasily to his
way with actors.